Crowdsourced
In two recent stories
Know Your Return-Per-Image and
Stock Photo Production Costs I discussed two very important issues for anyone trying to earn a portion of their living from stock image production. The issues boil down to
(1) clearly understanding the cost of producing your images and
(2) the return you’re receiving from sales of those images. No business can survive if it spends more to produce its products than it earns from sales.
The European Parliament is debating new legislation that could require Facebook, Google, Twitter and other major players to share some of the advertising revenue they earn from making the information produced and supplied by major European press agencies available to readers for free.
Shutterstock has published a
infographic on The Top Trends Shaping The Future Of Imagery. Photographers looking to produce the kind of imagery customers want to buy may want to make note of these trends outlined by Keren Sachs, Director of Content Development at Shutterstock and Offset.
If there is going to be a business of producing and licensing rights to stock photos five or ten years from now, the industry needs a serious re-design. There are at least five areas that need serious modification if the industry is to include anything other than User Generated Content (UGC), or if there is to be revenue growth.
The take over of the stock photography business by amateurs and part-timers is not new, but the long range implications are worth considering.
The Shutterstock Contributor App that contributors may obtain from the Apple App store has been upgraded to allow contributors to directly attach, upload and manage model and property releases to their images from their phones.
I was recently asked for my views on where the stock photo industry is headed over the next few years, the value of the industry at present, and how I think the major players will adapt to the growing availability of user-generated content. Here’s my answer.
500px has announced that industry veteran Kelly Thompson has joined 500px as Head of Marketplace. Thompson will oversee the development of new products to service the company’s growing number of advertising agency and large brand enterprise accounts, as well as the servicing of the company’s base of self-service marketplace customers.
Scoopshot’s new focus on providing image buyers with professionally produced on-demand photography, produced to precise specifications, is a dramatic reversal from the company’s existing strategy of supplying User Generated Content (UGC).
Scoopshot has launched a new initiative that every professional photographer interested in working on assignment ought to consider. Their “
Everyone’s Private Photographer” initiative makes it easy for customers to input a location, anywhere in the world, where they need a photographer and immediately see a 9-image portfolio of each photographer operating in that area who might be able to perform a photo assignment.
Newzulu Limited (ASX: NWZ) is pleased to announce that it has entered a strategic partnership and content syndication agreement (Agreement) with
Alamy. Newzulu’s crowd-sourced news archive will be featured among Alamy’s collection of over 50 million images from which the platform has generated over US$154 million for its contributors in the last 15 years. Newzulu and Alamy will work together to generate revenue through the sale and licensing of Newzulu’s crowd-sourced content to Alamy’s editorial, creative and commercial clients worldwide.
Matt Munson, CEO of Twenty20, recently made the case for why User Generated Content (UGC) will be
The Death Of Stock Photos. He argued that “stock photos do not depict reality” and that “brands that use them risk coming off as generic and out-of-touch” with consumers.
Photocrowd is a relatively new social media site (launched in September 2013) that is designed to encourage photographers to shoot more pictures, work on assignments, participate in contests, build cool portfolios and socialize with each other.
Should traditional agencies be making more of an effort to source images from cell phone users? Sixteen months ago
Alamy introduced its
Stockimo app and started accepting images into its collection that are taken with cell phones. To date about 350,000 images have been submitted and about 170,000 accepted.
Many traditional suppliers of stock image (those that have been in business 15, 20 years or more) need to give some thought to what the image producing crowd wants. They need to consider possible ways of adjusting their business model in order to meet some of the needs of these part-time image creators. And they need to recognize how these photographers may change the entire stock photography licensing business.
Microsoft say that worldwide there are about 400 new powerpoint presentations being prepared each second. That works out to about 12.6 billion presentations a year. A significant percentage of them use multiple images. Some are the creator’s personal images. But the vast majority are grabbed from the Internet via Google, Bing, Flickr or somewhere else. If users paid even $1.00 for each image used in such presentations the annual gross revenue might be more than 5 times the revenue generated worldwide by the stock photo industry.
As the stock photo industry has changed and revenue for many stock images providers has declined many traditional providers have been forced to cut back on staff, and in particular editors. This is also true of many photo users who previously had time to review portfolios, encourage new talent and support new photographers as they improved their skills. Now, most of the editors and picture buyers that are left have trouble keeping up with the images that fly across their desks, let alone find time to seek out the best images and encourage new talent. So who does the editing?
PicHit.Me, Microsoft and
Shutterstock have teamed up to offer over $10,000 worth of prizes and Microsoft hardware to photographers who participate in the My World contest. Any photographer, amateur or professional, can enter and may interpret the theme of the competition any way they like. As a result PicHit will undoubtedly get images on every conceivable subject
Are we about to experience another major shift in the photography market similar to the shift from RM to RF and the dramatic changes brought about by Microstock? At the
CEPIC Congress in Warsaw on Friday June 5th at 10:00am I will be moderating a
panel discussion on Crowdsourcing and how it is likely to impact the stock photography business in the near future.
Getty Images, in collaboration with Instagram, has announced a call for entries for a new grant to support photographers using Instagram to document stories from underrepresented communities around the world. The three winners will each receive $10,000.
The launch of Windows 10 later this year could dramatically change the way people find pictures. On April 29th during the annual Microstock Build Developers Conference in San Francisco Microsoft CEO, Satya Nadella described how Microsoft intends to (1) Build the Intelligent Cloud, (2) Reinvent productivity and business process and (3) Create more personal computing.
EyeEm has raised $18 million in new venture capital and currently has a community of 13 million photographers across 150 countries.
In August 2014
EyeEm announced that it would be introducing a “Market” aspect to its social media site. Market has finally been launched. EyeEm was established in 2011 and currently has over 13 million users who post photos taken with their cell phones and comment on each other’s work. It is unclear how many images are on the site.
Global crowd-sourced media platform and live-streaming company,
Newzulu, and mobile photo and video crowdsourcing service
Scoopshot, have partnered to collect and market citizen generated content and offer untapped revenue opportunities to brands and publishers around the world.
A new mobile-oriented, crowdsourced photography service called
Twenty20 was launched recently. They claim to have the world’s largest crowdsourced commercial image catalog with 45 million imagers from 250,000 photographers based in 154 countries.